Blog Archives

Thanks to today’s Snow Day, I imported my old “Thoughts” posts to this new site. I like the Categories and Tags features, but I’m still getting a hang of them.
I’m going to make an effort to update on a regular basis once again.

After a very mild winter that ended shockingly early (examples: a bike ride in February, a long walk on March 1), it occurred to me that this is an El Niño year. El Niño causes exactly what we experienced this winter in Toronto – warmer temperatures, less snowfall, and earlier spring.

So every few years, winter ends a few weeks early… this sounds suspiciously like the ridiculously unscientific / superstitious event known as Groundhog Day. Science is better than groundhogs. Let’s call it El Niño Day. It should be a day off from work, too.

Daylight Savings Time should always be in effect. Moving the clocks back an hour in the fall seems to be so you’re not leaving for work when it’s dark. But when you leave work and it’s already dark out (again), it gives the feeling that the day is over and you should just stay home. (See “Seasonal Affective Disorder”). There are enough other people out when I leave for work that I’m not too torn up about it, but I do hate missing the entire day’s worth of sunlight because sunset is moved an hour earlier.

In March, when the clocks moved forward again, I went from getting up after the sun to getting up before it again. It felt like I was leaving for work at 5am. The gradual effect of days getting shorter in the fall doesn’t create this effect – only the sudden one hour shift does.

One “benefit” is the extra hour before last call on that one night a year when 2:00 becomes 1:00 again, but it takes a dedicated person to continue drinking through essentially 3:00 am. One night’s minor benefit is not worth 5 months of worsened living.